About the Author: Brian Everett is the CEO of the Transportation Marketing & Sales Association, and Senior Partner with MindShare Strategies. He has 25+ years marketing, sales and association management experience in transportation and logistics.

Much of my time spent is learning what’s top-of-mind with sales, marketing and business leaders in transportation and logistics. In the last 18 months, three things have constantly remained on the top of the list: lead generation and business growth, retaining and growing customers, and talent acquisition and management. These priorities take center stage with a backdrop of challenges, ranging from freight capacity issues to the driver shortage.

It’s now 2019 – and we’re now back from holiday breaks and assessing where to prioritize our time and resources. For many, budgets have now green lights and it’s “all hands on deck” to plan and implement the strategies that have been approved. However, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to start.

TMSA offers you an effective business tool we call the “ROI Estimator” to best assess the return on your investment – factoring in the ease and cost of implementation as well as the productivity return you’ll experience. If you routinely use this tool, you’re guaranteed to be able to make quicker decisions on which priorities to focus on based upon your budget, time and resources available, deadlines, and other important factors.

The 2019 Third-Party Logistics Study that recently was published shows that shippers and their 3PLs continue to increase more meaningful partnerships and are collaborating more closely to accomplish their supply chain goals. Both parties seem to have a much greater awareness of what they’re trying to accomplish as well as the ways in which the availability of data and the use of technology can help them progress.

Learning from other marketing, sales, and business leaders is one of the most valuable ways to move your own business forward. The Transportation Marketing & Sales Association brings together market intelligence and thought leadership that's specific and unique to transportation and logistics through our TMSA Blog.

A truly great supply chain partner is one who knows precisely which ingredients we need to make our operations successful — and those we can skip. Some partners can tell us, for instance, what technologies we need to deploy, when to implement and how to upgrade.

Others can advise who to contract for manufacturing and transportation, where to source parts and raw materials — or how to dispose of tainted or defective goods. They can help us finance supply chain operations, mitigate risk and ultimately bring together these disparate components to streamline our businesses.

Believing in bogus platitudes. Clustering into cliques. Trying too hard to be interesting. These and four other things could stop your marketing career in its tracks, as author Becki Saltzman wrote about in her recent book, Living Curiously: How to Use Curiosity to Be Remarkable and Do Good Stuff. Each mistake is very common in the world of marketing today, and likely noticeable by anyone who has worked in an office setting. And there’s no question that each can stop a high-potential career in its tracks.

When you think about the four phases of the Buyer’s Journey (Attract Suspects and Prospects, Convert Leads, Close and Retain Customers), many companies don’t place nearly enough energy and resources into expanding business with current customers and turning them into your biggest advocates.

By many indicators, the economy is strong – but where will it be in the months to come? And with consumer demand at high levels, how long will this last? And with capacity challenges, the ongoing driver shortage, and burdensome regulations, what is the overall outlook for providers of commercial freight services?

These are common questions currently being asked in the commercial transportation industry. A closer analysis at economic trends analysis provides some educated perspective.

Inbound Logistics, a TMSA Affiliate member and Media Friend, recently announced its annual G75 for 2018 — a carefully curated list of 75 companies that go above and beyond to ensure their global supply chains are sustainable, and their operations are socially and environmentally friendly. These companies, several that are TMSA members, have spent years developing and implementing best practices to ensure the footprint they leave on the world is a positive one. Congratulations to these TMSA member companies for their accomplishments that allowed them to make the list in 2018:

By Jennifer Karpus-Romain, Director of Marketing for Intelestream, a Chicago-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product development and consulting firm that offers solutions related to business processes and CRM technology.

Looking for a unique promotional item that can be given to customers, prospects, employees or even your drivers?

TMSA is pleased to provide a special promotion to all TMSA Members on a significantly discounted quality baseball cap. Now you can purchase an order of branded caps with your company logo (3D embroidery and back flat embroidery) for as little as U.S. $3.99 each!

By Simon Bois, Executive Director Sales for Canadian-based Turbo Images, a company that has been designing, printing and installing superior quality fleet graphics and wraps for its customers since 1993. Turbo Images is a TMSA Affiliate member.

During the 2018 TMSA Logistics Marketing & Sales Conference this week, attendees had their choice of 20 topics that involved peer-to-peer discussion on opportunities, challenges and best practices involving those topics. One topic was on lead management. Jason Ickert, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, FLS Transportation Services facilitated discussions on this topic and shares a summary of what his peer group discussed:

Lead Generation can come from a multitude of sources. As we spoke about challenges and best practices in our Lead Management Interactive Discussion Roundtable, it became evident that to more easily manage and track a lead’s progress and conversion, one must be able to deploy technology that provides visibility.

As a marketing, communications and sales professional in North American transportation and logistics, you likely manage the private information of your customer, prospects, workforces and/or key stakeholders. If so, the General Data Protection Regulation should stop you in your tracks.

Particularly if you’re managing relationships, data, and marketing activities involving targets in the European Union (EU).

If you're going to have a successful business relationship with a customer, a team associate, or any other stakeholder for that matter, it's critical that you build credibility. This is particularly true in a business relationship. But surprisingly, only 13% of customers believe salespeople demonstrate understanding of their business challenges, according to Forrester Research’s Buyer Insight study.

You can overcome this obstacle through a concept called "Empathetic Listening," according to Eric Maddox, who used this technique while serving as an interrogator in support of operation Iraqi Freedom. Maddox's efforts were pivotal in achieving actionable intelligence from numerous detainees. During his time, Maddox created a unique methodology and technique for "Empathetic Listening" and used it to collect the intelligence which led to the exact location of Saddam Hussein – the Ace of Spades in the infamous Deck of Cards.

By Ian Addison, LinkedIn ABM. If you find this article interesting, Addison will be presenting a live TMSA webinar, "Real Account-Based Marketing Using LinkedIn," on June 1 at 11am Central. > Register Now

Before taking an Account Based Sales & Marketing approach, Schneider Logistics was seeing maybe 1 out of 5 leads engage successfully. In speaking with many other complex solution-sales companies, I am finding that has become a growing trend.

By Adrian Gonzalez of "Talking Logistics," who was named recently as another well-known industry thought leader who will be speaking at the upcoming 2018 TMSA Logistics Marketing & Sales Conference June 10-12 near Fort Myers, Florida. Sign up to follow his blog at www.TalkingLogistics.com.

Shippers today find themselves in a difficult and costly situation: their routing guides are often broken and they’re having to go to the spot market to cover their loads, which is costing more than they had budgeted. The great transportation spot market inversion has occurred. What does that mean for shippers? How should they respond? And what actions should they take longer term to prepare for whatever market conditions lie ahead?